Review: ‘In The Company Of Women’

Paying tribute to the work of women independent filmmakers from the 1980s to the present, co-directors Lesli Klainberg and Gini Reticker's "In the Company of Women" offers a serviceable, but uninspired portrait of its subject that, like last year's 1970s movie-nostalgia docu, "A Decade Under the Influence," is more a primer for the uneducated than a definitive text.

Paying tribute to the work of women independent filmmakers from the 1980s to the present, co-directors Lesli Klainberg and Gini Reticker’s “In the Company of Women” offers a serviceable, but uninspired portrait of its subject that, like last year’s 1970s movie-nostalgia docu, “A Decade Under the Influence,” is more a primer for the uneducated than a definitive text. Like “Decade,” pic is an original production of (and a canny promotional tool for programming on) the Independent Film Channel, where it will be broadcast beginning March 18.

A conventional assemblage of film clips and interviews with filmmakers and critics, pic is most useful when drawing connections among the women’s social movements of the 1970s, the desire to see a more recognizably female perspective in cinema and the resultant new, open sexuality in American indie features, as well as the increase in stories about working-class characters. Yet the net cast by the pic is frustratingly narrow, detailing only a handful of seminal independent films, events or personalities while failing to acknowledge either pre-1980’s pioneers or those women who have made a name for themselves working in studio and/or cult/exploitation pics.